Customer Reviews

My Name Is Sei Shonagon

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a novel about a woman in modern Japan. In an ingenious plot device, the woman, as a favor to a friend, converses with the friend's depressed and shy father, using a screen to separate them visually, kind of like a psychiatrist's couch. This turns into something of a career, but also echoes the writings of a famous medieval Japanese woman author, at a time when noblewomen led secluded lives. The love of beauty unites the two women, and is an important element in both historic periods, however unsatisfactory other aspects of the periods are. Now Blensdorf had lived in Japan only 2 years when she wrote this book, and I cannot vouch for the accuracy of some of her commentaries on modern Japanese life; certainly, she isn't very artful or subtle in conveying them. Nor is Sei Shonagon's general plot line very artful or subtle. What Blensdorf does remarkably well is to make the reader experience the woman's love of beauty, and its powers of sustenance.

Many have written of the otherness of Japan, about its history and culture but few have managed to get inside its soul in the way Jan Blensdorf has done. My Name is Sei Shonagon is no mere travel book.

The story itself is set in contemporary Tokyo and emerges via a series of intriguing memories and flashbacks recounted by a near-comatose woman known as Sei Shonagon. Even as the tale gets beneath the skin of the modern city, it is revealing the contrasting threads of beauty and violence that run through the whole of Japanese history. Whether one knows much about Japanese life or not, this book floods the mind with colours, sounds, odours and images of the daily theatre that is Japanese life. You emerge from reading as if from a dream rich with ambiguities.

Jan Blensdorf spent two years in Japan and inevitably her direct experience must have been as a foreigner, an expat, but she has said in interviews that gradually she came to internalise many of the Japanese attitudes, customs and forms of daily life. For me that is also what makes the character of Sei so fascinating - that she is somehow suspended between two cultures: she has the inside knowledge available to a Japanese together with the detachment of a critic. Her struggle for personal survival - in many senses - is only one part of a complex tale that deftly interweaves the lives of various people Sei comes to know at a level of extraordinary intimacy.

My Name is Sei Shonagon is a multi-layered experience - a story of suspense, a celebration of beauty and, above all, a meditation on the search for personal identity.

The only reason I didn't give this book a one-star rating is that it starts off with some beautiful writing -- spare, lovely descriptions of beauty and Japanese traditions such as calligraphy and incense. There are also some interesting takes on Japanese society and life.

That said, the book relies too heavily on this and not enough on plot and character. I'm not a fan of totally plot-driven writing, but the conceit of this book -- that the author is in a coma, looking over her life -- is difficult to carry off even in the hands of a seasoned novelist. It's not impossible; I think of the biographical novel of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original "Siamese Twins," which starts with one of the twins waiting for his death. That, though, relays the events of their lives in a lively way, as if they are just happening, so you forget that the entire book is a flashback. In this case, though, the writing style is all reminiscent, a style that works all right for the first 40 pages but then becomes unremittingly flat. The main character never gets out of her own head, and the book never really comes alive.

Neither do most of the characters, most of whom are cardboard cutouts: distant husband (disposed of in three pages from marriage to divorce), evil uncle, saintly mother. We don't see what motivates the uncle to do what he does, even though it's pivotal to the book; and even though the character suddenly has enough spine to stand up to her uncle and husband, we don't see where it came from in her life.

And the ending! It's such a quickie, tacked-on ending that it almost makes me think the author had a page limit and had to end the book within that. She badly needed a discerning editor, or good reader, one who wasn't overly charmed by her (often) well-done descriptions of Japan into mistaking them for successful fiction.

As a long-term resident of Japan, I also became irritated by the book's tedious focus on depicting modern Japanese life, often heavy-handed and frequently cliche. It was nearly possible to check off every modern cliche about Japan, especially towards the end: Hello Kitty, train suicides, gropers. The author was using these images to substitute for those essential building blocks of a real novel: plot, character development, resolution.

Some very beautiful writing here, almost painfully lovely. If the author could match them up with a bit more action and more complex characters, she'd probably have a best-seller.

This is an exquisite book. It covers a lot of ground from ancient to modern Japan in relatively few pages. The author did a great job on several of the characters and for me the book was well paced up to the end. I will be looking for the next book from J. Blensdorf.

It started out interesting enough, but towards the middle I got absolutely bored. I have no idea what I just read.

The narrator - it is characteristic of this enigmatic novel that we never know her real name - is a woman whose father was American and whose mother was Japanese. She was born in the United States, but when she was seven years old, her father died and her mother took her back to Tokyo with her; and that was a great culture shock for the child. They lived with the mother's brother, a harsh, deeply conservative and spartan Japanese, very controlling of his sister and now of his little niece. She is reproached for being only half-Japanese, has to learn not to ask questions, to speak more quietly, and is expected to learn everything about his own passion, the history of Japanese swords and of the samurai tradition. The little girl found some solace in writing down stories about her life in America. She read these to her unhappy mother, who called her `my little Sei Shonagon' after a woman at the imperial court in the 10th century, who recorded her life and her reflections in `the Pillow Book'.

So here we have the record of the narrator's Japanese life. We live with her at first in her uncle's austere house where rooms are separated only by thin paper screens. Later she somehow inherits an incense shop. Above it there is also such a room. We are not told how it came about that a variety of men come to talk to her in that room. She is separated from them by a screen, such as in the 10th century would have separated Sei Shonagon from the men she had entertained. But she is not entertaining them: she is more like a priest in a confessional box or a Freudian analyst sitting out of sight of the patient. Through what the men tell her, we catch further glimpses of Japanese life: the huge pressures on life in modern Tokyo, rushed and ugly, overcrowded on pavements and transport, where compulsive shopping and electronic games are a kind of safety valve, and where garish colours of goods, advertisements and modern art are such a contrast to the subtler colours of classical Japanese painting. Indeed Tokyo is contrasted - save for the expected submission of women - with the old traditional Japan which can still be found in the countryside. And sometimes the men come to her for stories of old Japan. If they want to know more about her than the stories, she heads them off. Until ...

The Australian-born author, we are told, has spent two years in Tokyo, and I assume the culture shock must have been hers also. She would have grappled with the contrast between the ugly and the graceful side of Japan. There are musings on the standard subjects of calligraphy, of paper, of carp, of gardens, of cherry blossom, of jade. But in the end she probably found Japanese society as alienating as Amélie Nothomb found it in Fear and Trembling (see my review) or Gavin Kramer in Shopping. This book is more artistic and more poetic than either of these, but is also more fragmented and in some respects elusive.

This is a well-written book, with careful evocations of place - sight and scent especially. It is enahnced by a little background browsing. Read the chapter on "Women of the Heiean..." in The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris and browse a bit in his translation of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon for a better grasp of the model for her evening chats with men friends (complete with traditional screen).